Cold metal

Another crystal from wonderful snowfall 16th january 2014. This one was around 4 millimeters in diameter. Glass background with backlight, additional lens Helios 44M-5, 8 RAWs averaged. Looks better in original resolution: 1600 x 1200.

More snowflakes in set snowflakes and snow crystals.
Also i wrote small article about my shooting technique.

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Less is more

Small snowflake, around 1 mm in diameter. Glass background with multi-colour backlight, additional lens Helios 44M-5, january 2014, Moscow. 8 RAWs averaged. Looks better in original resolution: 1024 x 768.

More snowflakes in set snowflakes and snow crystals.
Also i wrote small article about my shooting technique.

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One million page views

...in six months, since i moved my blog from nearly dead russian segment of LiveJournal to excellent Blogger platform.
Thank you very much, dear visitors!

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Massive gold

New shot from 16th january 2014. That day in Moscow was wonderful snowfall, and i shoot ~20 Gb of RAW+Jpeg sources - i'll process more nice crystals soon. I used simple multi-colour light (fragment of white / orange pattern from plastic bag on flashlight with 5 LEDs). Glass background with backlight, additional lens Helios 44M-5. Looks better in original resolution: 1365 x 1024.

This snowflake as desktop wallpaper in wallpapers section.

More snowflakes in set snowflakes and snow crystals.
Also i wrote small article about my shooting technique.

Alternate colors:

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In the hall of the mountain king

This is tiny snowflake, less than 1 millimeter in diameter. Recently i especially hunting for rainbow snowflakes, shooting tiny hexagonal plates like this on horizontal glass sheet, pointing macro setup at angle with small desktop tripod. After hour of trial and error, i catched some crystals with this effect.

This picture was made by averaging stack of 16 RAWs for better details and colors of such small object.
Original resolution: 1024 x 768.

More snowflakes in set snowflakes and snow crystals.
Also i wrote small article about my shooting technique.

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What colour of snow is your favorite?

Yesterday i tried to capture that nice rainbow-like optical effect, which sometimes can be seen in snowflake photos. This thin film optical interference effect also can be seen in soap bubbles.

In case of snowflakes, it can be seen rarely than in bubbles and usually it is more subtle, with pink and cyan colors dominance. Not any snowflake have thin enough layers of ice and air inside to produce this effect, and if we want to see and capture it, we need to choose right angle for camera, where light of snowflake's surface will reflect. Don Komarechka described in detail this fascinating effect (among many other interesting topics about snowflakes) in his book "Sky Crystals: Unraveling the Mysteries of Snowflakes".

For these shots, i pointed macro setup at snow crystals (tiny hexagonal plates) and changed angle of camera, hoping to see colors at camera screen. Lighting of scene was only dim gray light of cloudy sky. This is crops from unmodified shots, without any color or contrast enchancements:

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Circuit

Finally, in Moscow good coldness and some snow, and i tried slightly different shooting: this medium sized crystal (around 3 mm) captured in natural light at glass surface. Macro setup stands on small desktop tripod and shoots at angle. For achieving acceptable DOF i focus stacked 13 shots (and 13 was not enough even for this single small crystal). Serie for focus stacking done using great script "focus bracketing" for CHDK firmware. Because i use focus stacking instead of averaging, it was hard time while denoising this picture, and still, noise is clearly visible. Definitely, this will not be my favourite shooting method, but it have it's own advantages: with it, we can get nice volumetric details of crystals surface, and good chances to catch colourful thin film optical interference effect in snowflake's centers.

Original resolution: 1443 x 1082.

More snowflakes in set snowflakes and snow crystals.
Also i wrote small article about my shooting technique.

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Ornate pattern

Medium size snowflake, 3 or 4 millimeters in diameter. 8 shots averaged to boost signal-to-noise ratio. Glass background with backlight, additional lens Helios 44M-5, january 2013, Moscow. Looks better in original resolution: 1725 x 1294.

More snowflakes in set snowflakes and snow crystals.
Also i wrote small article about my shooting technique.

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Moscow at day, HDR

Although i prefer night HDR shots (they look interesting even with very simple processing), there is some daytime photos:

(2048 x 1536)

(1600 x 1466)

(1600 x 1200)

(2048 x 1536)

(768 x 1024)

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